The Imperialist eBook

In the wide stretches of a new country there is nothing
to bound a local excitement, or to impede its transmission
at full value. Elgin was a manufacturing town
in southern Ontario, but they would have known every
development of the Federal Bank case at the North
Pole if there had been anybody there to learn.
In Halifax they did know it, and in Vancouver, B.C.,
while every hundred miles nearer it warmed as a topic
in proportion. In Montreal the papers gave it
headlines; from Toronto they sent special reporters.
Of course, it was most of all the opportunity of Mr
Horace Williams, of the Elgin Express, and of Rawlins,
who held all the cards in their hands, and played
them, it must be said, admirably, reducing the Mercury
to all sorts of futile expedients to score, which
the Express would invariably explode with a guffaw
of contradiction the following day. It was to
the Express that the Toronto reporters came for details
and local colour; and Mr Williams gave them just as
much as he thought they ought to have and no more.
It was the Express that managed, while elaborately
abstaining from improper comment upon a matter sub
judice, to feed and support the general conviction
of young Ormiston’s innocence, and thereby win
for itself, though a “Grit” paper, wide
reading in that hotbed of Toryism, Moneida Reservation,
while the Conservative Mercury, with its reckless
sympathy for an old party name, made itself criminally
liable by reviewing cases of hard dealing by the bank
among the farmers, and only escaped prosecution by
the amplest retraction and the most contrite apology.
As Mr Williams remarked, there was no use in dwelling
on the unpopularity of the bank, that didn’t
need pointing out; folks down Moneida way could put
any newspaper wise on the number of mortgages foreclosed
and the rate for secondary loans exacted by the bank
in those parts. That consideration, no doubt,
human nature being what it is, contributed the active
principle to the feeling so widely aroused by the case.
We are not very readily the prey to emotions of faith
in our fellows, especially, perhaps, if we live under
conditions somewhat hard and narrow; the greater animosity
behind is, at all events, valuable to give force and
relief and staying power to a sentiment of generous
conviction. But however we may depreciate its
origin, the conviction was there, widespread in the
townships: young Ormiston would “get clear”;
the case for the defence might be heard over every
bushel of oats in Elgin market-place.

In Elgin itself opinion was more reserved. There
was a general view that these bank clerks were fast
fellows, and a tendency to contrast the habits and
the pay of such dashing young men, an exercise which
ended in a not unnatural query. As to the irritating
caste feeling maintained among them, young Ormiston
perhaps gave himself as few airs as any. He was
generally conceded indeed by the judging sex to be
“nice to everybody”; but was not that
exactly the nature for which temptations were most